


doesn't matter

by 4cky



Category: Fate/EXTRA
Genre: Disasters, Gen, Hospitalization, Memory Loss, Non-binary Hakuno, Pre-Game(s)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-25
Updated: 2016-07-25
Packaged: 2018-07-26 17:07:55
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,166
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7582642
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/4cky/pseuds/4cky
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The doctors say their name is Hakuno Kishinami, and it is one of the few things they know about themself.</p>
            </blockquote>





	doesn't matter

The doctors say their name is Hakuno Kishinami. 

This has apparently been repeated hundreds of times, perhaps even thousands. Frankly, Hakuno Kishinami would not know. Things that they are aware of are limited. Their hair is brown (they have retained a familiarity with the basic colors, even if they’ve forgotten thousands of other things). Their hair, also, has a tendency towards feeling unpleasant due to a lack of washing.

Their mouth is frequently dry, which is explained to them as a side effect of their medication. Medication is a long and complicated word that belongs to the realm of doctors and drips in and out of their brain like it’s water from a tap. The feeling of a dry mouth is uncomfortable, but it reminds them of when they are awake, because there’s little about it that feels different from sleeping otherwise.

They are hooked up to dozens of machines; this one monitors their heart, this one watches their oxygen level, this one keeps them fed. This is not due to their remembering this, it is because when they wake up they always wonder, and more often than not, it is explained. It hurts inside of them, but this is another reminder that they are not asleep. Getting a full night of sleep is difficult because someone is always by every few hours to make certain that the machines are still working, that they are still alive.

The doctors tell them that they have Amnesia Syndrome, and that it is contagious, and that they are in quarantine which is why no one aside from those in uniform come to see them. Amnesia Syndrome makes one forget. That seems correct, given how they wake up every morning uncertain of where they are, but they’ve forgotten fear at that point. 

This is (oddly enough) not to say that their mind is empty. They remember a lot of small, strange tidbits. There was a woman during the Heian era who served the emperor who was rumored to be a fox shapeshifter. There are a pair of married swords from the Spring and Autumn era made by Gan Jiang, forged after his wife sacrificed herself. There was a Roman emperor for which the book of Revelation was said to have been written due to his cruel treatment of Christians around 50 B. C. Their mind was a font of this limitless trivia, a black hole of self that could only give them information from the decades and centuries before they were even born.

They’ve asked many times what Amnesia Syndrome is. The doctors have said it is a contagious disease of forgetting. Hakuno Kishinami wonders if forgetting is truly so bad that they must be contained in this manner. The long, grim faces grow even more drawn as they inform their patient that Amnesia Syndrome also causes nerve death, a ‘forgetting of muscle memory’. They ask once whether it would be possible for them to forget basic functions, like breathing, or regulating their heart. Hakuno Kishinami half expects and half hopes that this will get a laugh from their grim-faced caretakers. It doesn’t. 

“Should it come to that… they are more than capable of freezing your functions until you can obtain treatment,” one of the doctors tells his patient. They aren’t certain whether this is terrifying or comforting. Hakuno Kishinami didn’t know if being frozen with a dubious chance of being brought back to the waking world was something that would actually benefit them. 

But they could take comfort in continuing to live.

It feels like they have been in their little observation room, with instruments and people going in and out in environmental suits, since they were born. Until a group of them hoist their body out of the bed that they’ve grown used to. They hear bits and pieces of what they tell each other: ‘sealed’ ‘Pieceman’, and most importantly ‘surgery’. The final word rattles in their brain, its meaning flitting away as if it were a swallow caught in their skull. The meaning escapes them. 

The new bed they rest on is cold, despite the thin sheet separating them from the metal underneath. It strikes them that ‘bed’ was an inappropriate word for where they were resting now. This was probably the last thought floated in their diseased brain before the world crashed around them. 

The sky they’d only seen through a window is above them, burning. They were in a sealed room, they weren’t any longer. Houses were collapsing. It seems like people are screaming, falling to the ground, but they can’t hear a thing. 

Something has happened, although they don’t know or understand what. Mouth is full of metal, blood flows unrelentingly as sound starts to return to their ears. Hakuno Kishinami is unaware of many things, but this is certainly what death looks like. Parents and children screaming for each other until they, too, are gone. Soldiers with guns scatter through the streets.

Hakuno Kishinami did not know or understand what a normal life was. Their memories held only useless trivia that helped no one. And even they could understand this was not a life anyone should be living. This was hell. This was a wholly undeserved damnation. And why did it happen?

The simple, three-letter question continued to simmer in their head. Why was this happening? Why had the world become this perdition?

Something warm and damp fell onto Hakuno Kishinami’s head. Face lifting towards the sky, rain dripped onto their cheeks. They open their mouth, water dribbling onto their dry tongue. The sounds of screaming, the chaos, all of it was being swallowed by the drops hitting the pavement. Everything is cleansed. And yet, death hangs heavy over this scene. This shouldn’t have happened. 

Perhaps if there was a way they could be saved, a way to live again, they could avoid this. 

Or perhaps not. They may not understand or remember many things, but they know death is permanent. They close their eyes, raising a hand to the sky. They wonder, silently, if this is what prayer is like, as they recite words to themself. _I will not die. I will not die because I must understand why. I will persist._

_I must._

Their name is Hakuno Kishinami, and they do not want to die.

 

 

 

 

……….

 

 

 

 

 **Preliminiary Examination [excerpts]** Patient is a young adult (age estimated between 16 and 19) brought to this facility after the collapse of the hospital they were being treated in…..  
…..Records remaining on this patient are limited at this time, and will probably remain this way until their medical records are decrypted….

….

Patient manages to have stable vitals following life support procedures….. Unfortunately, surgery is no longer a viable option, due to the loss of Dr. Twice Pieceman during the collapse…..  
They have not regained consciousness since the incident….. This facility is capable of cryogenics, we have initiated protocol to put the patient in stasis until such a time when treatment is possible….

 

Date: XX/XX/20XX


End file.
